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Learning to Make Anigifs and Earning Badges at #MozFest | MIT Center for Civic Media

J. Nathan Matias

PhD Student, MIT Media Lab Center for Civic Media

At the Center for Civic Media and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Nathan researches factors that contribute to flourishing & fair participation online, making and
evaluating interventions for safe, fair, creative, and effective societies.

Nathan's current projects (C.V.) include large scale experiments on reducing discrimination and harassment online, as well as observational studies on social movements, civic participation, and social change. Nathan regularly liveblogs talks and events and has published journalism in the Atlantic, Guardian, and PBS IdeaLab. He coordinated the Media Lab Festival of Learning in 2012 and 2013.

Learning to Make Anigifs and Earning Badges at #MozFest

I'm here in London at the Mozilla Festival all weekend, where I'm joining Rebecca Mullen and Matt Thompson on the liveblog team. I just got to interview Alayna, who learned to make animated gifs for the very first time today and earned four Open Badges in the process.

I asked Alanya, who lives in London, if she knew about animated gifs before coming to the festival. "I have seen a lot of animated gifs on Google and I wanted to make an animated gif before, but I didn't know how to do it."

We got sheets of paper and positioned them. Then we put a webcam above the paper. We positioned the camera face down on the paper. Then we went to meemoo.org and took a lot of photos with the webcam to make the animated gif.

I really love Alayna's animations, especially this one with a kitten and a mouse. Notice the variety of techniques she uses to create her stop-motion comic:

She swaps between two different cat drawings to show her cat moving

She moves the mouse across the table to animate its motion

The two drawings become one for the part that shows the cat eating its meal

She adds new words per frame to the final speech bubble to make it more like spech

Alayna also learned how to use Thimble to publish her animation to the web. Because Thimble is part of the Mozilla Open Badge program, she earned several badges in the process: the hyperlinker, editor, Thumble Projectizer, and (my favourite), the codewhisperer badge. Alayna's badges are automatically collected on the Open Badge Backpack, where she can share them on the web. Sharing things on the web is familiar to Alayna. She tweets at @kittycatalayna and already has 77 followers.

When we asked what she thought of the Mozilla Festival, Alayna described it as a fun event with lots of geeks in their 20s and lots of teens who are learning to make things on the web. And then she was gone, off to learn how to build hackable games.